[BangPypers] Open Calais ? Bellenix meeting

Tue Oct 20 05:28:50 CEST 2009

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 8:24 PM, Arvind Jamuna Dixit <ardsrk at gmail.com>wrote:

> The demo given by Anand on semantic search of feeds using OpenCalais was
> very interesting.
> The fact that his app essentially did something that Feedly<http://www.feedly.com/>( based on Google Reader ) does piqued my interest.
>
> Feedly too uses OpenCalais to get semantic information on a blog post and
> for search.
> If you use Google Reader as a RSS reader then you have to check out Feedly.
>
> Anand used python-calais <http://code.google.com/p/python-calais/> for
> communicating to the OpenCalais API<http://opencalais.com/documentation/calais-web-service-api/api-invocation/rest>
> .
> Anand then showed how OpenCalais categorized the input text into entities,
> topics and relations.
> With every entity OpenCalais attached a percentage that indicated how sure
> it was on the element being the entity
> whose identity was given by a URL. For instance, there is a URL identiying
> the entity "Android" as a product.
>
> Open Calais is exciting new technology that has made information gathering
> applications like Feedly and Klezio <http://www.klezio.com/> possible.
> Another application is Tagaroo <http://tagaroo.opencalais.com/> a
> wordpress plugin that automatically generates tags as you type your blog
> post.
>
> In the meetup Anand said that the current state-of-the-art of semantic web
> is not even 5% of its potential. A quick search of the term
> imagine semantic web<http://www.readwriteweb.com/fastsearch?search=imagine+semantic+web&x=0&y=0>on ReadWriteWeb shows that a lot of businesses and visionaries are betting
> big on semantic web and know that
> it has a lot of potential.

Excellent summary. Btw, I am summarizing the links I used in the meeting.
There was no presentation, I did an ad-hoc talk, so these could be of help.

http://www.opencalais.com - OpenCalais
http://www.klezio.com  - Klezio a "meta news" aggregator using OpenCalais
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_web_patterns.php - Guide to
semantic
web patterns @ RWW

Btw, I will be adding more intelligence to my application over the coming
weeks.
For example, the current prototype uses a simple search across tags returned
by OpenCalais, I plan to replace this with something better for IR, such as
Xapian. There can be further presentations of the app and discussions on
semantic web in the coming weeks, if anyone is interested.

>
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 11:17 AM, Anand Balachandran Pillai <
> abpillai at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 9:30 PM, Sriram Narayanan <sriramnrn at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 8:52 PM, Noufal Ibrahim <noufal at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> > Hi,
>>> >  I had some stuff to take care of and was too tired to attend the
>>> > meeting. How did it go? Any tidbits that the list might benefit from?
>>> >
>>>
>>> The opencalais session was good. I'm going to tell my colleagues about
>>> this, and they'd surely explore it more.
>>>
>>> Anand and Ramdas have asked that we have sessions again with more
>>> detail. I agree, since the scant amount of ZFS that I showcased today
>>> was in itself radically different from what we all know from other
>>> file systems.
>>>
>>> I request feedback from other attendees on today's ZFS session. Please
>>> let me know what else you'd have liked me to cover at an introduction
>>> level.
>>>
>>
>> We had a good meeting. There were some initial hiccups with the
>> projector but moving to a separate meeting room solved it.
>>
>> I presented a brief introduction to semantic web and showcased the
>> OpenCalais API using python-calais. I showed how to extract semantic
>> concepts (categories) from existing data using the API.
>>
>> I went on to demo my application which listens to a couple of mobile
>> phone news feeds and uses semantic information returned by OpenCalais
>> to provide specific natural language queries (not exactly NLP there yet,
>> but I am simulating NLP like queries) which return specific answers.
>>
>> The demo showed making a query on "cost of motorola android" and
>> this returning the specific data requested on the price of the most
>> recent motorola android mobile phones.
>>
>> I will wait for some other attendee for their feedback on how good
>> this was rather than making the comment myself :)
>>
>> This was followed by a very good session by Sriram and Moinak on
>> the capabilities of ZFS. I don't want to get into details, but I was blown
>> away by the capabilities of ZFS. I had only read about it before and never
>> seen it in action, so when Sriram showed how to increase the storage
>> of an existing volume by adding another device and just adding it to
>> the volume using "zfs add" it was just too good to believe. ZFS
>> makes those actions which could take hours using Linux ext3
>> look trivial and done within seconds...!
>>
>> We started the ZFS session a bit late i.e around 5.30 pm so there
>> was not much time to showcase all the bits planned. We dispersed
>> around 6.10 pm.
>>
>> We were 7 attendees in total.
>>
>>
>>>
>>> -- Sriram
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> BangPypers mailing list
>>> BangPypers at python.org
>>> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> --Anand
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
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-- 
--Anand
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